Category: Announcements

In 2004, DARPA held the first Grand Challenge for an autonomous car to drive 142 miles through the Mojave desert in under 10 hours. Fifteen cars participated, none finished. In 2005, the Challenge was repeated and 23 cars entered. Four finished under 10 hours and our car “Stanley” won in 6 hours and 53 minutes—11 minutes ahead of the next car. Then, in 2010, the Google self-driving car navigated 1,000 miles of public roads in California, an unbelievable advance from that first challenge.

Today, six years later, autonomous cars have become one of the hottest areas for innovation. The Boston Consulting Group estimates the market for autonomous cars will hit $42 billion in 2025. The World Health Organization reports there are 1.2 million traffic fatalities globally every year and driverless cars could be poised to save no less than 1 million lives per year.

Technology companies, automotive manufacturers, media giants, and start-ups around the world are rapidly pushing new advances in this space, whether it be hardware or software. And, they all need talent.

This is where Udacity comes in. Today, we are announcing that our Udacity Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree program is open for students to apply. It is the first and only program of its kind where most people with an internet connection—from Detroit to Damascus and from Adelaide to Aleppo—can learn the skills they need to work in one of the most amazing fields of our time.

When our students ask, we strive to answer. That’s why we’re so excited to announce this new feature, because it’s something we know our students really want. Offline learning for mobile is here, and we now support offline on both platforms—iOS and Android!

It was just last week that we launched the Android Basics by Google Nanodegree program, and the response has been incredible.

As part of that launch with Google, we announced that the first 50 students to graduate from Android Basics would receive full scholarships to enroll in our career-track Android Developer program. Since that announcement, the leaderboard where we’re tracking student progress has been … electrifying!

Have you SEEN the leaderboard? It’s been a week, and we’ve already got students who’ve completed their studies and earned their scholarships. Wow!

It’s a great time to become an Android Developer, and there have never been better opportunities to start preparing for a career in this rapidly expanding field. Our new Android Basics Nanodegree by Google offers aspiring developers with little to no programming experience an exclusive opportunity to get started on the path to an amazing career in Android Development by learning directly from experts at Google.

50 Android Developer Nanodegree Scholarships From Google!

Successfully transitioning to this advanced degree program is a critical step for becoming an in-demand Android Developer, and with the support of Google, students now have a powerful financial incentive to pursue their career goals. Enrolled students will be able to monitor their Nanodegree progress on a public leaderboard, and Udacity mentors, coaches, project reviewers, and student support experts will help students stay on track from enrollment to graduation.

Hottest Jobs of 2016: Android Developer

There are currently 1.4 billion activated Android devices in the world today, and that number is growing. In India, China, and the EU5, Android holds a significant market share, and demand for developers is growing dramatically. Mary Meeker’s recently released Internet Trends Report predicts another year of significant gains for Android vs. iOS, and countless employment studies have placed App Developer at the top of their “Hot Jobs” lists, with salary growth estimates running above 20% year-over-year. Right now, there are well over 3,000 open Android Developer jobs on LinkedIn. Indeed.com shows nearly double that.

Do those numbers have you thinking about starting to build your own Android apps? Maybe you even have a great idea for an Android app, but don’t believe you’re capable of building it yourself? Well, think again!

The Android Basics Nanodegree by Google

We are extremely excited to launch our latest Nanodegree program with Google. The Udacity-Google partnership is one of the most valuable and unique assets we provide to our students, and this new program is a perfect example of this collaboration in action. Designed for students who don’t yet have experience building apps, Android Basics by Google will provide a guided, efficient path for new developers to learn the essential skills needed to build apps for Android. This includes:

The essentials of the Java programming language

Interacting with Web APIs

Using a SQLite database

Most importantly, students will learn how to transform an app idea into a technically sound plan that can be implemented successfully. By the end of the Nanodegree, students will be ready to take the career-track Android Developer Nanodegree program, and will have built and submitted 10 projects, 8 of which are functional apps.

What You Need To Know Before Enrolling

The Android Basics Nanodegree by Google costs $199 per month and features all the unique components that are integral to the Nanodegree experience, including:

Specialized courses built with—and taught by—Google experts.

Learn-by-doing projects that enable students to create real products, and build professional portfolios.

With the addition of Android Basics Nanodegree by Google, we now offer every single student a point-of-entry into the world of Android Development, whether they’re just starting to program, or already building apps.

Historically, data analysis was a lot of looking backwards. What happened, and what does it mean? That way of doing things is literally history. With the amount of data now available to the modern business, analysis is all about looking forward. What can we expect, and how can we get ahead? Enter Predictive Analytics.

Astro Teller: Polymath

Astro Teller holds a Masters of Science in symbolic and heuristic computation, a Bachelor of Science in computer science, and a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence. He has founded or co-founded a hedge fund management firm, a wearable body monitoring company, and an intellectual property holding company. He is the author of several fiction books, and recently co-authored a nonfiction work with his wife. He has taught at Stanford, and was the recipient of the prestigious Hertz fellowship while at Carnegie Mellon University.

Astro Teller: Captain of Moonshots

And yet! And yet … despite all these remarkable accomplishments, it is undoubtedly his current role that he is most known for:

Current and future iOS Developers, you’re in quite a spot these days. Swift is here, Swift 3.0 is coming, but there is still so much out there written in Objective-C. More and more companies are moving TO Swift as their main programming language, but those same companies have a LOT of legacy Objective-C code that has to be dealt with. Interoperability, to put it mildly, is a big deal. The true champions in this space will be those developers who know and understand both Objective-C and Swift, and who can—perhaps most importantly—rewrite from the former to the latter. Will this be you?